Tips & tricks to help you get the most out of your online advertising.

Google AdWords Quick Wins: Two Reports that Could Save You Thousands

If you’ve ever worked with small to medium-sized businesses on search marketing campaigns, you know that there are a lot of smart, busy people running their own AdWords campaigns. Often times these campaigns are driving lots of qualified traffic, but the people managing the campaigns don’t have much time to dedicate to making optimizations within the campaigns.

For that reason “quick wins” within an AdWords account can be very valuable to these types of advertisers, so we wanted to show you two quick reports that you can use within your campaigns that will frequently unearth some campaign inefficiencies that you didn’t realize were there.

Quick Win #1: Are Search Partners Generating Quality Traffic?

Each of these reports will show you a dimension of your campaigns that you might not typically look at. Within your search-focused campaigns you can quickly take a look at the performance of your campaign on the search partners network. These are third-party sites and Google properties other than Google.com and the Google toolbar. These sites can often perform much differently than the core Google.com search traffic so it’s certainly worth checking out.

You can do this by looking at your campaigns in the campaign tab, and adding a “Network (with search partners)” segment to your report:

Then you’ll be able to see the data broken out by network:

The sample size is small in the example above but in many instances when you pull this report over a long enough period of time, you’ll often see major inefficiencies and opportunities to turn off the search partners network if it is underperforming.

Quick Win #2: Are Your Ads Working on Mobile Devices?

Similarly, we can quickly drill down to see how our ads are performing on various types of devices:

And now again we see the data broken down within the campaign tab to show how the campaign is performing by device:

This is a rather common occurrence – in your largest campaign you might see certain types of devices performing very differently than others. Now you can go back to the AdWords campaign settings and turn off the underperformer (in this case mobile) and/or split it off into its own campaign. In this instance if we created a clone of the campaign and had that clone show ads on mobile with significantly reduced bids, that might dramatically cut down the cost per conversion and ultimately allow us to keep some of the volume at a reduced (and profitable) cost per acquisition.

As with any campaign it’s best to spend most of your time – particularly in the early stages of campaign creation – on fundamentals, but by drilling down into some of these quick, non-standard views you can frequently make very valuable observations without investing a lot of time in campaign optimization.